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  Have a Happy Thought:       Some months ago, I was stumped trying to remember / discover a word. I was pretty sure this word existed, I just couldn’t find it anywhere, and my google skills were failing me... as was everyone I asked.      You may be then happy to know that I randomly stumbled across the answer, thanks to a “mutual” on social media. (For those that don’t know: a “mutual” is someone that you follow, that also follows you – i.e., you are mutually following each other).     This is relevant because the t hing I kept googling was: " what’s the word for when two species that are symbiotic, but only one of them benefits – and the other one isn’t hurt?”     Because you see I knew the word “symbiosis”, which I thought meant two species that rely on each other to reproduce / get food / generally survive – in other words, both benefit .     And I knew the word “parasite”, which is when one species benefits but ...

Have a Happy Thought:     Most of us humans tend to speak more slowly with dogs than we do with other humans. And it turns out, there may be a very good reason for this. You see, human brains, when producing or listening to sounds, tend to operate on a brainwave pattern that peaks about four times per second – known as theta waves .     On a side (but related) note, many of you have listened to someone speaking in a language that you don’t understand, and may have noticed that this other language sounds “fast” to you. Well, it turns out that some languages do use more syllables-per-second than oth er languages. And there doesn’t seem to be any pattern to how ‘quickly’ languages are spoken.   As a visual, here is the average number of syllables-per-second spoken by native speakers of various languages     Image: Syllable rate, in syllables per second, across 17 languages from multiple language groups. Figure from Christophe Coupé  et al...